PORT ALLEN —- It’s the end of an era for the West Baton Rouge weekly newspaper, The West Side Journal.
After 88 years in print, the Journal issued its final newspaper on Oct. 31, marking an end to one of West Baton Rouge Parish’s oldest and most revered weekly publications.
Due to the failing health of publisher and owner, George Jenne, the journal ultimately decided to fold.
At its offices in Port Allen, bound newspaper issues from as far back as 1937 can be found, holding bygone stories and maybe even some long-forgotten secrets from a radically different West Baton Rouge Parish.
The newspaper’s origins date as far back as 1852 when it was started by Philip Winfree Jr. and called the Capitolian Vis-a-Vis before Judge Henry Hyams purchased it in 1855 and renamed it the Sugar Planter.
As it’s known now, The West Side Journal began publication in 1937 when the population of West Baton Rouge Parish was fewer than 11,000 residents.
In its more than 170 years in circulation, the only time the newspaper wasn’t regularly printed was during the Civil War from 1861-65. Other newspapers in the south around that time, such as the Vicksburg Daily, resorted to printing papers on wallpaper to stay in circulation.
Shelli LeMonie-LaGrange is a West Baton Rouge native and worked at the Journal for the previous 11 years, including serving as the newspaper’s general manager since 2021.
She said growing up, the newspaper was not only a staple in her own life but across the entire parish.
“I remember my parents having a subscription but most people had a subscription because that’s how people got their local news. I was even featured as baby of the week in an issue,” LaGrange told UWK. “If you lived in West Baton Rouge Parish at some point in your life, whether it was an engagement, a wedding, sports, 4-H, you made the paper.”
Breanna Smith Pizzolato also worked at the paper for several years, starting as an intern in 2016 and eventually working her way up to the publication’s editor starting in 2019.
She said the Journal shutting down is more than just the loss of another weekly newspaper, it’s an example of a community partially losing its own voice.
“There are several generations of people who have benefitted from local news coverage,” Pizzolato said. “The role of journalism is to serve as the watchdog of the government and be the eyes and ears of the people on issues that are going to impact them on a day-to-day basis and make a difference in their lives and their neighbors’ lives.”
She said it’s been difficult watching her former coworkers go through the closing but also said it’s been especially hard because of what the newspaper has meant for the people of West Baton Rouge Parish.
“It’s been really heavy on my heart that it’s closing and not just because I hate to see it happen to my former coworkers and a place where I got my start in writing and journalism, but because the people of the West Side are so special. It’s a unique and tight-knit community that deserves to have its stories told.”
The Journal’s closure is also not unique from a national perspective. Since 2005, nearly 3,000 newspapers across the U.S. have shuttered their windows, with more than 130 shutting down in the previous two years. According to Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing and Communications, that’s an average loss of 2.5 newspapers per week. That means that since 2005, one-third of the country’s newspapers have ceased to exist.
In fact there are 204 counties or parishes across the nation with no local news outlets. More than half of all U.S. counties or parishes either have no local news sources or only have one remaining, typically in the form of a weekly newspaper.
“Unfortunately more and more small newspapers are closing and most of them have already shuttered their doors. It just makes me sad for the people of the West Side. I think back to the phone calls and the letters and the number of people that would pop in and ask questions or want to know things or look in the archives and they won’t have that resource. They won’t have that place to go anymore to learn about what’s happening in their community and have their voices elevated,” Pizzolato said.
While Pizzolato said that doesn’t mean it’s the end of news coverage in West Baton Rouge Parish, it’s hard for large and often corporate-owned publications to take an entrenched stake in a community like the Journal did.
“When you outsource that kind of coverage to a much larger newspaper that has a lot of parishes and cities and city councils to cover, you lose a lot of power. You also get a lot more coverage of negative things and far less coverage of positive things,” Pizzolato explained.
LaGrange said the newspaper will also ensure its archives remain protected to preserve as much history about the parish as possible. She said the archives will be donated to a local library or museum but said the logistics of where the archives will end up is still being figured out.
“There is a lot of rich history in the archives of the Westside Journal,” LaGrange said.
Jenne originally purchased the newspaper in 1997 and has owned it ever since.
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